OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Daunting Dilemma with Sentence Encoders: Success on Standard Benchmarks, Failure in Capturing Basic Semantic Properties
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we adopted a retrospective approach to examine and compare five existing popular sentence encoders, i.e., Sentence-BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), LASER, InferSent, and Doc2vec, in terms of their performance on downstream tasks versus their capability to capture basic semantic properties. Initially, we evaluated all five sentence encoders on the popular SentEval benchmark and found that multiple sentence encoders perform quite well on a variety of popular downstream tasks. However, being unable to find a single winner in all cases, we designed further experiments to gain a deeper understanding of their behavior. Specifically, we proposed four semantic evaluation criteria, i.e., Paraphrasing, Synonym Replacement, Antonym Replacement, and Sentence Jumbling, and evaluated the same five sentence encoders using these criteria. We found that the Sentence-Bert and USE models pass the paraphrasing criterion, with SBERT being the superior between the two. LASER dominates in the case of the synonym replacement criterion. Interestingly, all the sentence encoders failed the antonym replacement and jumbling criteria. These results suggest that although these popular sentence encoders perform quite well on the SentEval benchmark, they still struggle to capture some basic semantic properties, thus, posing a daunting dilemma in NLP research.
TSGBench: Time Series Generation Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Synthetic Time Series Generation (TSG) is crucial in a range of applications, including data augmentation, anomaly detection, and privacy preservation. Although significant strides have been made in this field, existing methods exhibit three key limitations: (1) They often benchmark against similar model types, constraining a holistic view of performance capabilities. (2) The use of specialized synthetic and private datasets introduces biases and hampers generalizability. (3) Ambiguous evaluation measures, often tied to custom networks or downstream tasks, hinder consistent and fair comparison. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textsf{TSGBench}, the inaugural Time Series Generation Benchmark, designed for a unified and comprehensive assessment of TSG methods. It comprises three modules: (1) a curated collection of publicly available, real-world datasets tailored for TSG, together with a standardized preprocessing pipeline; (2) a comprehensive evaluation measures suite including vanilla measures, new distance-based assessments, and visualization tools; (3) a pioneering generalization test rooted in Domain Adaptation (DA), compatible with all methods. We have conducted comprehensive experiments using \textsf{TSGBench} across a spectrum of ten real-world datasets from diverse domains, utilizing ten advanced TSG methods and twelve evaluation measures. The results highlight the reliability and efficacy of \textsf{TSGBench} in evaluating TSG methods. Crucially, \textsf{TSGBench} delivers a statistical analysis of the performance rankings of these methods, illuminating their varying performance across different datasets and measures and offering nuanced insights into the effectiveness of each method.
CPU frequency scheduling of real-time applications on embedded devices with temporal encoding-based deep reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Small devices are frequently used in IoT and smart-city applications to perform periodic dedicated tasks with soft deadlines. This work focuses on developing methods to derive efficient power-management methods for periodic tasks on small devices. We first study the limitations of the existing Linux built-in methods used in small devices. We illustrate three typical workload/system patterns that are challenging to manage with Linux's built-in solutions. We develop a reinforcement-learning-based technique with temporal encoding to derive an effective DVFS governor even with the presence of the three system patterns. The derived governor uses only one performance counter, the same as the built-in Linux mechanism, and does not require an explicit task model for the workload. We implemented a prototype system on the Nvidia Jetson Nano Board and experimented with it with six applications, including two self-designed and four benchmark applications. Under different deadline constraints, our approach can quickly derive a DVFS governor that can adapt to performance requirements and outperform the built-in Linux approach in energy saving. On Mibench workloads, with performance slack ranging from 0.04 s to 0.4 s, the proposed method can save 3% - 11% more energy compared to Ondemand. AudioReg and FaceReg applications tested have 5%- 14% energy-saving improvement. We have open-sourced the implementation of our in-kernel quantized neural network engine. The codebase can be found at: https://github.com/coladog/tinyagent.
USA: Universal Sentiment Analysis Model & Construction of Japanese Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal task in the domain of natural language processing. It encompasses both text-level sentiment polarity classification and word-level Part of Speech(POS) sentiment polarity determination. Such analysis challenges models to understand text holistically while also extracting nuanced information. With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), new avenues for sentiment analysis have opened. This paper proposes enhancing performance by leveraging the Mutual Reinforcement Effect(MRE) between individual words and the overall text. It delves into how word polarity influences the overarching sentiment of a passage. To support our research, we annotated four novel Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech(SCPOS) datasets, building upon existing sentiment classification datasets. Furthermore, we developed a Universal Sentiment Analysis(USA) model, with a 7-billion parameter size. Experimental results revealed that our model surpassed the performance of gpt-3.5-turbo across all four datasets, underscoring the significance of MRE in sentiment analysis.
Systematic Mapping of Monolithic Applications to Microservices Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The aim of this paper to provide the solution microservices architecture as a popular alternative to monolithic architecture. It discusses the advantages of microservices and the challenges that organizations face when transitioning from a monolithic system. It presents a case study of a financial application and proposed techniques for identifying microservices on monolithic systems using domain-driven development concepts. In recent years, microservices architecture has emerged as a new architectural style in the software development industry. As legacy monolithic software becomes too large to manage, many large corporations are considering converting their traditional monolithic systems into small-scale, self-contained microservices. However, migrating from monolithic to microservices architecture is a difficult and challenging task. It presents a comparison of the two architectural styles and discusses the difficulties that led companies to switch to microservices. The study's findings suggest that the proposed technique can improve work performance and establish clear models, but it may not be useful for systems with lower levels of complexity. This research paper has practical implications for software architects and developers who are considering migrating from monolithic to microservices architecture.
T2IW: Joint Text to Image & Watermark Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent developments in text-conditioned image generative models have revolutionized the production of realistic results. Unfortunately, this has also led to an increase in privacy violations and the spread of false information, which requires the need for traceability, privacy protection, and other security measures. However, existing text-to-image paradigms lack the technical capabilities to link traceable messages with image generation. In this study, we introduce a novel task for the joint generation of text to image and watermark (T2IW). This T2IW scheme ensures minimal damage to image quality when generating a compound image by forcing the semantic feature and the watermark signal to be compatible in pixels. Additionally, by utilizing principles from Shannon information theory and non-cooperative game theory, we are able to separate the revealed image and the revealed watermark from the compound image. Furthermore, we strengthen the watermark robustness of our approach by subjecting the compound image to various post-processing attacks, with minimal pixel distortion observed in the revealed watermark. Extensive experiments have demonstrated remarkable achievements in image quality, watermark invisibility, and watermark robustness, supported by our proposed set of evaluation metrics.
On the Reduction of the Spherical Point-in-Polygon Problem for Antipode-Excluding Spherical Polygons
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

Spherical polygons used in practice are nice, but the spherical point-in-polygon problem (SPiP) has long eluded solutions based on the winding number (wn). That a punctured sphere is simply connected is to blame. As a workaround, we prove that requiring the boundary of a spherical polygon to never intersect its antipode is sufficient to reduce its SPiP problem to the planar, point-in-polygon (PiP) problem, whose state-of-the-art solution uses wn and does not utilize known interior points (KIP). We refer to such spherical polygons as boundary antipode-excluding (BAE) and show that all spherical polygons fully contained within an open hemisphere is BAE. We document two successful reduction methods, one based on rotation and the other on shearing, and address a common concern. Both reduction algorithms, when combined with a wn-PiP algorithm, solve SPiP correctly and efficiently for BAE spherical polygons. The MATLAB code provided demonstrates scenarios that are problematic for previous work.
ArtHDR-Net: Perceptually Realistic and Accurate HDR Content Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

High Dynamic Range (HDR) content creation has become an important topic for modern media and entertainment sectors, gaming and Augmented/Virtual Reality industries. Many methods have been proposed to recreate the HDR counterparts of input Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images/videos given a single exposure or multi-exposure LDRs. The state-of-the-art methods focus primarily on the preservation of the reconstruction's structural similarity and the pixel-wise accuracy. However, these conventional approaches do not emphasize preserving the artistic intent of the images in terms of human visual perception, which is an essential element in media, entertainment and gaming. In this paper, we attempt to study and fill this gap. We propose an architecture called ArtHDR-Net based on a Convolutional Neural Network that uses multi-exposed LDR features as input. Experimental results show that ArtHDR-Net can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of the HDR-VDP-2 score (i.e., mean opinion score index) while reaching competitive performance in terms of PSNR and SSIM.
Uncovering Drift in Textual Data: An Unsupervised Method for Detecting and Mitigating Drift in Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Drift in machine learning refers to the phenomenon where the statistical properties of data or context, in which the model operates, change over time leading to a decrease in its performance. Therefore, maintaining a constant monitoring process for machine learning model performance is crucial in order to proactively prevent any potential performance regression. However, supervised drift detection methods require human annotation and consequently lead to a longer time to detect and mitigate the drift. In our proposed unsupervised drift detection method, we follow a two step process. Our first step involves encoding a sample of production data as the target distribution, and the model training data as the reference distribution. In the second step, we employ a kernel-based statistical test that utilizes the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance metric to compare the reference and target distributions and estimate any potential drift. Our method also identifies the subset of production data that is the root cause of the drift. The models retrained using these identified high drift samples show improved performance on online customer experience quality metrics.
Experimental Study of Adversarial Attacks on ML-based xApps in O-RAN
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is considered as a major step in the evolution of next-generation cellular networks given its support for open interfaces and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) into the deployment, operation, and maintenance of RAN. However, due to the openness of the O-RAN architecture, such AI models are inherently vulnerable to various adversarial machine learning (ML) attacks, i.e., adversarial attacks which correspond to slight manipulation of the input to the ML model. In this work, we showcase the vulnerability of an example ML model used in O-RAN, and experimentally deploy it in the near-real time (near-RT) RAN intelligent controller (RIC). Our ML-based interference classifier xApp (extensible application in near-RT RIC) tries to classify the type of interference to mitigate the interference effect on the O-RAN system. We demonstrate the first-ever scenario of how such an xApp can be impacted through an adversarial attack by manipulating the data stored in a shared database inside the near-RT RIC. Through a rigorous performance analysis deployed on a laboratory O-RAN testbed, we evaluate the performance in terms of capacity and the prediction accuracy of the interference classifier xApp using both clean and perturbed data. We show that even small adversarial attacks can significantly decrease the accuracy of ML application in near-RT RIC, which can directly impact the performance of the entire O-RAN deployment.
A Robust Adaptive Workload Orchestration in Pure Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Pure Edge computing (PEC) aims to bring cloud applications and services to the edge of the network to support the growing user demand for time-sensitive applications and data-driven computing. However, mobility and limited computational capacity of edge devices pose challenges in supporting some urgent and computationally intensive tasks with strict response time demands. If the execution results of these tasks exceed the deadline, they become worthless and can cause severe safety issues. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that edge nodes complete as many latency-sensitive tasks as possible. \\In this paper, we propose a Robust Adaptive Workload Orchestration (R-AdWOrch) model to minimize deadline misses and data loss by using priority definition and a reallocation strategy. The results show that R-AdWOrch can minimize deadline misses of urgent tasks while minimizing the data loss of lower priority tasks under all conditions.
Random Expert Sampling for Deep Learning Segmentation of Acute Ischemic Stroke on Non-contrast CT
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Purpose: Multi-expert deep learning training methods to automatically quantify ischemic brain tissue on Non-Contrast CT Materials and Methods: The data set consisted of 260 Non-Contrast CTs from 233 patients of acute ischemic stroke patients recruited in the DEFUSE 3 trial. A benchmark U-Net was trained on the reference annotations of three experienced neuroradiologists to segment ischemic brain tissue using majority vote and random expert sampling training schemes. We used a one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test on a set of segmentation metrics to compare bootstrapped point estimates of the training schemes with the inter-expert agreement and ratio of variance for consistency analysis. We further compare volumes with the 24h-follow-up DWI (final infarct core) in the patient subgroup with full reperfusion and we test volumes for correlation to the clinical outcome (mRS after 30 and 90 days) with the Spearman method. Results: Random expert sampling leads to a model that shows better agreement with experts than experts agree among themselves and better agreement than the agreement between experts and a majority-vote model performance (Surface Dice at Tolerance 5mm improvement of 61% to 0.70 +- 0.03 and Dice improvement of 25% to 0.50 +- 0.04). The model-based predicted volume similarly estimated the final infarct volume and correlated better to the clinical outcome than CT perfusion. Conclusion: A model trained on random expert sampling can identify the presence and location of acute ischemic brain tissue on Non-Contrast CT similar to CT perfusion and with better consistency than experts. This may further secure the selection of patients eligible for endovascular treatment in less specialized hospitals.
Separable Self and Mixed Attention Transformers for Efficient Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The deployment of transformers for visual object tracking has shown state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks. However, the transformer-based models are under-utilized for Siamese lightweight tracking due to the computational complexity of their attention blocks. This paper proposes an efficient self and mixed attention transformer-based architecture for lightweight tracking. The proposed backbone utilizes the separable mixed attention transformers to fuse the template and search regions during feature extraction to generate superior feature encoding. Our prediction head performs global contextual modeling of the encoded features by leveraging efficient self-attention blocks for robust target state estimation. With these contributions, the proposed lightweight tracker deploys a transformer-based backbone and head module concurrently for the first time. Our ablation study testifies to the effectiveness of the proposed combination of backbone and head modules. Simulations show that our Separable Self and Mixed Attention-based Tracker, SMAT, surpasses the performance of related lightweight trackers on GOT10k, TrackingNet, LaSOT, NfS30, UAV123, and AVisT datasets, while running at 37 fps on CPU, 158 fps on GPU, and having 3.8M parameters. For example, it significantly surpasses the closely related trackers E.T.Track and MixFormerV2-S on GOT10k-test by a margin of 7.9% and 5.8%, respectively, in the AO metric. The tracker code and model is available at https://github.com/goutamyg/SMAT
ConDA: Contrastive Domain Adaptation for AI-generated Text Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for generating text in a variety of use cases, including journalistic news articles. Given the potential malicious nature in which these LLMs can be used to generate disinformation at scale, it is important to build effective detectors for such AI-generated text. Given the surge in development of new LLMs, acquiring labeled training data for supervised detectors is a bottleneck. However, there might be plenty of unlabeled text data available, without information on which generator it came from. In this work we tackle this data problem, in detecting AI-generated news text, and frame the problem as an unsupervised domain adaptation task. Here the domains are the different text generators, i.e. LLMs, and we assume we have access to only the labeled source data and unlabeled target data. We develop a Contrastive Domain Adaptation framework, called ConDA, that blends standard domain adaptation techniques with the representation power of contrastive learning to learn domain invariant representations that are effective for the final unsupervised detection task. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, resulting in average performance gains of 31.7% from the best performing baselines, and within 0.8% margin of a fully supervised detector. All our code and data is available at https://github.com/AmritaBh/ConDA-gen-text-detection.
INSURE: An Information Theory Inspired Disentanglement and Purification Model for Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to learn a generalizable model on the unseen target domain by only training on the multiple observed source domains. Although a variety of DG methods have focused on extracting domain-invariant features, the domain-specific class-relevant features have attracted attention and been argued to benefit generalization to the unseen target domain. To take into account the class-relevant domain-specific information, in this paper we propose an Information theory iNspired diSentanglement and pURification modEl (INSURE) to explicitly disentangle the latent features to obtain sufficient and compact (necessary) class-relevant feature for generalization to the unseen domain. Specifically, we first propose an information theory inspired loss function to ensure the disentangled class-relevant features contain sufficient class label information and the other disentangled auxiliary feature has sufficient domain information. We further propose a paired purification loss function to let the auxiliary feature discard all the class-relevant information and thus the class-relevant feature will contain sufficient and compact (necessary) class-relevant information. Moreover, instead of using multiple encoders, we propose to use a learnable binary mask as our disentangler to make the disentanglement more efficient and make the disentangled features complementary to each other. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely used DG benchmark datasets including PACS, OfficeHome, TerraIncognita, and DomainNet. The proposed INSURE outperforms the state-of-art methods. We also empirically show that domain-specific class-relevant features are beneficial for domain generalization.
Two classes of reducible cyclic codes with large minimum symbol-pair distances
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The high-density data storage technology aims to design high-capacity storage at a relatively low cost. In order to achieve this goal, symbol-pair codes were proposed by Cassuto and Blaum \cite{CB10,CB11} to handle channels that output pairs of overlapping symbols. Such a channel is called symbol-pair read channel, which introduce new concept called symbol-pair weight and minimum symbol-pair distance. In this paper, we consider the parameters of two classes of reducible cyclic codes under the symbol-pair metric. Based on the theory of cyclotomic numbers and Gaussian period over finite fields, we show the possible symbol-pair weights of these codes. Their minimum symbol-pair distances are twice the minimum Hamming distances under some conditions. Moreover, we obtain some three symbol-pair weight codes and determine their symbol-pair weight distribution. A class of MDS symbol-pair codes is also established. Among other results, we determine the values of some generalized cyclotomic numbers.